RUDOLF STINGEL

WHILE THE ITALIAN ARTIST IS CURRENTLY BEING HONOURED WITH A RETROSPECTIVE AT THE BEYELER FOUNDATION, HE WASN’T ALWAYS THE VENERATED PAINTER HE’S BECOME TODAY. HIS FRIEND, THE CURATOR FRANCESCO BONAMI, RECALLS RUDOLF STINGEL’S LONG, LONELY TRAJECTORY TO THE TOP.

Something that annoys me quite a bit is people who call the famous by their first names, claiming an intimacy that’s sometimes true but mostly delusional. So even if I’ve known Rudolf Stingel maybe 61% of my life, I will refer to him simply by his last name, as we used to do at school in Italy, not out of respect but simply because our family names were less subject to possible misunderstandings, and maybe also because deep down we knew, with that unconscious wisdom all kids have, that nobody ever knows anyone else completely. I met Stingel in the mid-80s, at the studio of the brilliant photographer Toni Thorinbert (at the time very much in vogue), where we’d been summoned for one of those preposterous stories about the “next generation” of young artists, something in which, as a youngish artist myself, I believed with delusional trepidation. Stingel was another young artist living in what was then called la Milano da bere, “the drinking Milan,” a city that had escaped the anni di piombo of terrorism and political violence and was enjoying an age of utter superficiality led by guru-like figures such as fashion impresario Elio Fiorucci, burning every night in the surreal atmosphere of Plastic, a disco where young DJ Nicola Guiducci ruled supreme as though there was no tomorrow. Artists like Keith Haring or Nan Goldin had shows

there – Milan was cool, and both Stingel and I were enjoying a miniscule slice of success in the city as painters. But I remember that, at the photo shoot, I considered myself the cooler in my bespoke suit, where Stingel was bundled up in a dark coat with an existential attitude that he’s never truly abandoned. It wasn’t until a year after that first meeting, however, that we got to know each other, when we both moved to New York in search of gold. There we were both outsiders, sharing frustrating experiences in the cutthroat Manhattan art world. There were times when we were closer than others, but communication never really stopped completely. Different lives, same problems.

Soon enough I realized that my skills as an artist were leading nowhere and slowly, by serendipity rather than choice, I became an art critic and curator. Stingel, with a focus I only later recognized as one of his strongest qualities, remained not only an artist but a painter. Even though lured by the sirens of appropriation and conceptual art, he stuck to his guns, inquiring into the very nature of painting at a time when the medium’s obituary was being written every other day. His breakthrough came with the cynical, or desperate – the two often go hand in hand – idea of the “instruction painting”: he brought out a little orange instruction booklet, professionally shot, on how to make a Stingel painting – not a fake Stingel but a real one. It was a daring conceptual leap, difficult to grasp, and verging on self mockery. Soon after, in 1991, he showed a radical installation at Daniel Newburg Gallery on Broadway, with a glowing orange carpet flooding the entire floor of the space. Both ideas were so extreme and out of nowhere that nobody even noticed

them. And this is something that still puzzles me: the art world, and in particular the New York art world, is too self-obsessed not to record groundbreaking events like the Stingel carpet show or his instruction book. But still it was that very few people attended the opening, where a huge and ignored instruction painting hung in an adjacent room. I’ll spare you the banality of stating that Stingel was ahead of his time – he wasn’t – but he was the only one coping with the idea of painting on life support, trying to save it through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation – and himself with it, since he’d lost all sign of the vitality he’d been enjoying just few years before.

The story goes on and on, Stingel staying on the straight and narrow but remaining unnoticed for many years, while I slowly grew up as a curator. One thing I credit Stingel with, and myself vicariously too: as Richard Nixon would have said, even when his career and spirit were at the bottom of the valley, he kept climbing, avoiding all the short cuts, sure there was a bright peak up there to enjoy. For some mysterious reason I felt the same, often against the odds – but still it always seemed to me he knew what he was doing. Whether noticed or unnoticed, his shows were the right ones – no flaws, no signs of receding into short-lived trends. I waited, certain he would eventually catch up, which, as naturally as possible, he did, suddenly reaching the peak and confirming that the guy looming out of that 1985 Milan photo shoot, like a character from Dostoevsky in his dark coat, was the true painter of the “next generation.” Today, many people say, “I knew ‘Rudi.’” I’m sure they did. But they didn’t see the Stingel he would become.

WE’VE LONG BEEN FASCINATED BY HIS ABSTRACT CANVASES AND CARPET-PICTURES, BUT DO WE REALLY KNOW RUDOLF STINGEL? HIS RETROSPECTIVE AT THE BEYELER FOUNDATION IS THE CHANCE TO IMMERSE OURSELVES IN THE WORK OF THIS PASSIONATE, EXCITING AND ICONOCLASTIC PAINTER.

Trickster, provocateur, showman, painter- at- the- limits, Rudolf Stingel is capable of generating moments of sublime beauty. His silver rooms – made for the Italian Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale and the Whitney Museum in 2007 – are lined with sheets of Celotex, an off-the-shelf foil-covered insulation material in which visitors are invited to leave their mark. Yet they seduce: fretted with graffiti and gouges, the Celotex walls have a glamorous sparkle enhanced by the dappled light of a crystal chandelier. This skill in tricking spectacle out of the mundane (and then undermining it again) is a Stingel specialty. In 2013 he lined Venice’s vast Palazzo Grassi with contemporary carpeting manufactured to resemble antique Ottoman rugs. It flooded the entrance hall, cascaded over the stairs and climbed up the walls of the galleries above. Against the polychrome carpet, Stingel hung grisaille oil paintings: spare groupings of large abstract works, enlarged depictions of religious figurines, and portraits of himself, and his friend, the artist Franz West, copied

from stained and damaged photographs. Carpet has long been part of Stingel’s anti-painting repertoire. In 1993, in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale, Stingel installed a 9 m-long wall of thick-pile orange carpet, which visitors were invited to play with, leaving sculpted, gestural marks. The result was a changing “painting” that addressed the three-dimensional qualities of the surface: carpet pile and paint as materials that had depth and could be formed, rather than mere carriers of a two- dimensional image. Stingel’s orange carpet is now on show at London’s Tate Modern, and you can watch visitors of all ages plunge their hands joyfully into the fibres, digging the subversion of handling materials in a do- not- touch environment, and the agency of leaving a mark in an institution dedicated to patient looking. Like Stingel’s silver rooms, the carpet-paintings are about the enjoyment of colour, texture and leaving a record of yourself: you don’t need to know anything about art or its theories to enjoy them.

This act of gift-giving from artist to audience builds on the dynamic established in Stingel’s 1989 Instructions, Istruzioni, Anleitung..., a booklet published to accompany his first exhibition of Instructions paintings at Massimo de Carlo in Milan. An illustrated step-by-step guide in six languages of

how to create a Rudolf Stingel Instruction painting, it was anything but flippant; a riposte to the fetishization of the artist’s hand, it raised the question of why one of these gauze paintings created by Stingel himself might be valued more highly than one created using identical processes by someone else. As with Stingel’s silver rooms and carpet works, this was a flamboyant trashing of protocol, an artist destroying his own myth, undermining the idea of “genius” by revealing art-making as an easy and accessible undertaking. Stingel’s figurative works, meanwhile, are paintings of photographs as physical objects: at Palazzo Grassi, his portrait appeared complete with red wine stains and white rings etched into the surface by beer bottles or coffee cups – an uncherished object. A recent series of animal pictures was taken from an old German calendar, their muted colours drawn from the source photograph rather than “nature.” This exploration of the poverty of the image is of a piece with Stingel’s interest in exposing the processes of art making, using materials both humble and decadent to joust with the pure restraint of Modernism. Among his early works is a series made by walking solvent across Styrofoam, leaving tracks like footprints in the snow. In his 2004 exhibition of

wallpaper paintings in London, Stingel presented a series of identically sized gold canvases that, on closer inspection, carried intricate wallpaper patterns. On even closer inspection the immaculate repetition within the patterns themselves turned out to be broken by “faults” introduced during the process of hand painting.

The idea of poor and luxurious materials – Styrofoam and gold – in itself raises the question of taste, and the associations that materials bring. Such references and connections were legion at the Palazzo Grassi, Stingel’s carpet there recalling Venice’s historic trading relationship with the Islamic world, such rugs being so prevalent in Renaissance artworks that their designs are classified by the artists who immortalized them – a Bellini carpet, a Memling carpet, a Lotto carpet (the paintings, in most cases, having long outlived the woven textiles they represent). The fully carpeted space also suggests the interior of a mosque, as well as Sigmund Freud’s Vienna and London consultation rooms. Thus, the irreverent Stingel recast the gallery as a place of worship; the architect of participatory artworks set-dressed his exhibition as an ersatz site of psychic analysis.